Village Voice Lays Off 13 of 17 Union Employees

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About a dozen employees at The Village Voice were told on Wednesday that they would no longer have jobs after the third week of September, a union representative said.CreditCreditDrew Angerer/Getty Images

Just before 3 p.m. on Wednesday, employees at The Village Voice in Manhattan received an email from co-workers saying that the weekly newspaper appeared to be on the verge of announcing layoffs.

Within a few hours about a dozen employees were summoned into a conference room inside The Voice office in the Financial District and told that they would no longer have jobs after the third week of September, a union representative said, when the paper’s final print edition will be distributed.

Thirteen of the paper’s 17 union workers are being laid off, said the president of the local that has represented Voice workers since 1977, when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. According to the union, they include a writer, a social media producer, an administrative assistant and a photo editor who has worked for decades at the left-leaning newspaper, which was started in 1955 by Norman Mailer and others then went on to provide a blueprint for a scrappy, muckraking journalistic format that became known as the alt-weekly.

Coming about a week after the Voice announced that it would end its print edition as part of an effort by a new owner to “revitalize and reimagine The Village Voice brand,” the layoffs are a manifestation of tensions that some staff members said have roiled the newsroom for the last few months, as the newspaper’s management has negotiated terms of the contract that covered close to half of what the union said was a staff about 40.

“We were shocked,” Maida Rosenstein, president of the United Auto Workers Local 2110, which represents The Voice’s union members, said during a phone call on Thursday. “And frankly, we’re appalled because of the proportion of the bargaining unit being let go.”

A spokesman for the Voice said in a written statement, “The staff reductions initiated yesterday are part of a larger set of budget cuts aimed at reallocating resources as we reconfigure The Village Voice into a digitally focused company.”

She added, “The overwhelming majority of the employees affected are on the business side and in positions primarily tied to the selling and production of the print paper.”

The paper’s union members began discussions with its management in June, shortly before their contract expired at the end of that month. The Voice, which was bought in 2015 by Peter D. Barbey, whose family has long owned the Reading Eagle newspaper in Pennsylvania, approached the negotiations with an aggressive stance, Ms. Rosenstein said.

She said that the paper wanted to remove job security provisions and grievance rights from the next contract. It also proposed eliminating severance, child care subsidies, a tuition assistance program, retirement account contributions and language related to affirmative action, she added. The union pushed back. At the same time, members created a strike fund, raising money at a Lower East Side theater where they screened “The Pajama Game,” a 1957 film starring Doris Day about a couple whose romantic relationship is strained by a labor-management dispute at a pajama factory in Iowa.

About a week ago, Ms. Rosenstein said, the newspaper agreed to extend the existing contract covering union employees through February and disclosed that the print edition would soon end. The paper’s representatives also warned that there could be some loss of jobs, Ms. Rosenstein said, but told the union that it was too soon to say who might be affected or when. The paper agreed to “bargain over the impact” of any layoffs, Ms. Rosenstein said, adding “they were at pains to tell us that they wanted to make a real go of the digital edition and expected the union to be a part of all that.”

During the layoff announcements on Wednesday, Ms. Rosenstein said, there were no individual meetings and no employee was told why their job was being eliminated. It does not appear that any nonunion workers were laid off, she added, and Local 2110 is planning to look into whether the layoff of union members was retaliatory or unlawful.

Voice staff members declined to comment on Thursday, saying they feared reprisals.

Over the years, the Voice, known for news reporting and cultural criticism, became a New York City institution read across the country. It was an incubator of talent, an arbiter of a certain definition of downtown hipness and a subscriber to the editorial philosophy of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Its pages provided a platform for investigative reporters like Wayne Barrett, Tom Robbins and Jack Newfield, who wrote long, detailed and sometimes outraged stories about skulduggery and corruption.

Mr. Robbins, who was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2016 for a series of stories on prison violence that was published in The New York Times and now teaches at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, said news of the layoffs was dismaying, especially coming right after word of the print edition’s impending demise.

“It’s really turning into a wake,” Mr. Robbins said Thursday. “To throw out almost all of the union members goes against the grain of the Voice we love and cherish.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Village Voice Cuts 13 of 17 Union Workers as Print Edition Winds Down. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe